With Valentine’s Day just passed, and with love in the air, I thought it is as good of a time as ever to look at ways to show your blog some love and give it an upgrade. With many companies and bloggers using the first part of the year to improve their website and get their content strategy in order for 2014, now is the perfect time to improve your blog and make sure it is in line with your marketing strategy this year.

Content development, blogging strategies, internet marketing, and of course, Google are ever changing and showing your blog some love from time to time will ensure that you stay on top of things.

5 Ways to Show Your Blog Some Love

Here are five ways that you can show your blog some love. They include:

Give it a new look. Just like with your website design, the look of your blog cannot remain static. To keep new and returning users interested you need to change things up. You will also need to change design elements as they become dated and more effective and efficient options become available. A few simple changes here and there (i.e. updating the format or adding a new header image) can go a long way.

Break up the text with visuals. Adding visuals to your blog posts is a must these days. Simply embedding an image into your post can have a significant impact on click through rates and how much your post is viewed, shared, and liked on social media. You have lots of options – images, screen shots, embedded videos are just a few of the most popular options. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!

Post More Frequently. Posting more frequently will not only give your users more to read, it will also help your website get crawled by search engines more frequently - an added SEO benefit. But remember – always focus on quality content over quantity.

Get your tagging and categorization in order. One area that often gets messy over time is tagging and categories. Invest some time in reviewing and refining how you categorize posts on your website. Limit the number of categories you use and only use one category per post. The same is relevant for tagging. Keep things simple and only use the most relevant tags given the topic of the blog post.

Improve usability. Doing things like improving pagination, internal linking and adding “Previous” and “Next Post” buttons will make it easier for users to navigate through your website. The easier it is to use, the easier it will be for your users to find what they are looking for.

When is the last time that you make changes to your blog? Did the changes provide the results you were looking for? Are you planning on making changes this year? What were they?